Despite rumours to the contrary, she told me on the phone, she was not a spy but a mere attaché, wanting only to chat about the future of Lebanon. These were kidnapping days in the Lebanese capital, when to be seen with the wrong luncheon companion could finish in a basement in south Beirut. I trusted this woman. I was wrong. She arrived with two armed British bodyguards who sat at the next table. Within minutes of sitting down at a fish restaurant in the cliff-top Raouche district, she started plying me with questions about Hezbollah’s armaments in southern Lebanon. I stood up and walked out. Hezbollah had two men at another neighbouring table. They called on me next morning. No problem, they said, they saw me walk out. But watch out.

. . . . . .ABSOLUTELY WORTH A FULL READ. . . . . .

More and more, WikiLeaks is exposing the hopeless nature of US foreign policy and that of its supposed “allies”. Attack on the international community indeed!

Fedor Dostoevsky: A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.

Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

Ben Gilad Top managers’ information is invariably either biased, subjecive, filtered or late. . . . Using intelligence correctly requires a fundamental change in the way top executives make decisions.

Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].

Alvin Toffler Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor

Robert Steele: The truth at any cost reduces all other costs.

Phi Beta Iota: The impoverishment of the US Government with respect to its connection with reality was made clear to us in Robert Steele’s second graduate thesis on the mismanagement of strategy to tactical national security information. Here is the conclusion in a nut-shell.

1. The US Government makes decisions based on ideology funded by political contributors, not on the basis of intelligence.

2. Apart from the above, the US Government at the decision level has access to roughly 2% of the relevant information. This is because a) it ignores virtually everything that is not in English; b) diplomats have no money to pay for legal ethical academic, commercial, or other tribe intelligence support; c) the spies, who have too much money, will only talk to traitors and fabricators; and d) to avoid staffing, such information as is gathered by various sections is more often than not sent back in the pouch and immediately filed or discarded, rather than processed into a shared electronic database.

3. Bottom line: collect “at best” 20% of what is relevant, spill 80% in post-collection non-processing, end up with 2%.